Reflections on “cultureless” anthropology

By Alexander Kotskii –

Homo Stupifactus

To taste the fruit, or chew on leaves instead,

To think of stepping out beyond the shade,

To roast some meat and not be scared of thunder,

To see within the flame a useful little wonder.

To smash phalanges fashioning an axe,

To fit a comic flake into a bone,

To throw a kinsman’s corpse in cave beneath the hill,

And ponder life and death, and what their properties reveal.

Why this precise and wrist-directed grip?

Why rise on two legs, totter, sway, and slip?

I do not think there was a goal in it.

But such’s the world, and I go running after it—

Freud once described a phenomenon he called the narcissism of minor differences. It describes very well the hostility that arises between people who are close and similar, and who fight all the more fiercely because they keep emphasizing how unlike one another they are. Perhaps that is one of the stranger things about anthropology too: a discipline that can speak of grip, gait, fire, kinship, and death in one breath still manages to divide itself into hostile camps.

My first year of studying cultural anthropology is coming to an end, so I will allow myself to say that I am a quarter of the way to being a cultural anthropologist. My background, however, is nothing like a humanities one. In the distant past I was a natural scientist, with a technical cast of mind. And for the last fifteen years or so I have in fact been doing some utterly borderline heresy somewhere between cooking, botany, and human physiology, which nobody counts as a science anyway, because it has no name for one thing (and also fails a number of other criteria for being a science, so, all in all, fairly enough).

I had wanted to get an education in anthropology for a very long time. I never really thought it would be cultural anthropology specifically – let alone that I would arrive at it through migration. One should be careful with one’s wishes. But then, suddenly, in one lecture by a science popularizer I adore, I heard the phrase that besides physical anthropology there is also cultural anthropology, but it deals with such ephemeral and useless things that it cannot really be counted as real anthropology at all. Oh, how I flared up then. I thought: the science exists, people work in it, my idol dislikes it and does not understand it – I absolutely must figure this out. I kept listening to his lectures, counting the number of dismissive remarks, smirking into my moustache while reading monographs, and gradually sinking into a humanities world that was new to me.

And I found nothing strange or stupid in it. On the contrary, it seemed to me that the ideas I knew well from physical anthropology found excellent illustrations in the works of cultural anthropologists. And then I understood that this was exactly what I needed. In the natural sciences I can find my way around on my own – I have had to do so in all sorts of them – but the humanities turned out to be more than I could bite off.

And what do we do when something is more than we can bite off? We go and study with those who have already worn their teeth down on that granite.

This is where cultural anthropology and I first met head-on.

What a torment Eriksen’s textbook became for me. Every time I ran into yet another inaccuracy from the point of view of the natural sciences, or yet another jab at physical anthropologists, I would throw the book aside, grind my teeth, and then come back to it again. Honestly, it was like eating a cactus. I cried and got pricked, but kept going. And I do not regret it. It is a good textbook after all.

One example that especially stayed with me is the discussion of race and genetics (Chapter 4, “The Social Person,” section “Nature and Society”). There, a real methodological porridge begins: race, ethnic group, phenotype, genetic variation, lactase persistence, and population all fly into the same pot. Even “gene” and “genome” seem to merge into one: Eriksen writes that humans share about 99.8% of their genes, although the number clearly belongs to genome-wide similarity, not to genes as discrete units. And this is where I burst like a party popper.

More importantly, in genetics, “races” are not, in any real sense, analytical units; genetics works with populations, variant frequencies, lines of descent, gene flow, and histories of admixture. In Eriksen, however, genetics ceases to be a precise language of description and is reduced to a microscope used for hammering nails.

And it was not only that textbook that provoked my irritation. Many course materials seemed marked by caution, suspicion, and occasional simplification in the face of methods from the natural sciences, and physical anthropology in particular, which remains close to my heart. I think that if it had not been for the teachers I encountered in the first three periods, I might have dropped the course altogether. Fortunately for me, they never spoke dismissively about the application of ideas from the natural sciences in cultural anthropology and even stressed the need to become acquainted with them.

To my own surprise, as I became more familiar with the methods, and especially with the terminology – with the language – I began more often to apply humanities frameworks where before I would have rationalized things through ecology, evolution, and physiology.

I am not going to lapse into Sapir-Whorfism and say that language determines thought, but I should, following Cohn, note that mastering a professional language entails a certain shift in perception. I often catch myself slipping into this and remind myself that learning a new language, even a professional one, should not reformat our thinking; it should expand the number of worlds available to us for understanding.

I do not want to generalize. I do not want to say that all anthropologists follow only the tradition in which they were raised. I am simply recording my observations. And I do not think the point is simply to condemn either the arrogance of physical anthropologists or the recurring conceptual slippage in parts of our course literature, where biological evolution, nineteenth-century evolutionism, Lamarckism, Darwinism, and biological reductionism begin to look like one undifferentiated enemy camp.

What surprises me more is something else: how rarely this chain of jabs is accompanied by a real desire to understand and figure things out, and how easily it becomes a cultureless attempt to belittle an alien branch of science.

And yet anthropology is, in some measure, unique as a science. It is a bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences, interdisciplinary within itself, making the human being both the object and the instrument of knowledge. And yet we stand on opposite sides of this bridge and trade jabs.

A remarkable waste from the point of view of cognition.

Alexander Kotskii is a bachelor student in Anthropology at the VU.